The fair and the museum: framing the popular
Louis Bayman and Sergio Rigoletto
Popular Italian cinema encompasses many delights: the foundational
spectacle of the early historical epics and the passionate theatricality of the first
screen divas take their place within a gallery of emotional and sensual pleasures.
Even the canonical works of Italy’s post-war art cinema grew from the soil of popular
genres and were nourished by traditions of theatricality and entertainment. And yet
while Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti and Antonioni are icons of the European auteur canon
and neorealism is a core unit of academic study, the vast and diverse output that
made cinema a key popular form in Italy remains in many ways more unfamiliar. This
volume aims to help correct this imbalance of attention by exploring films that may
count in one way or another as popular entertainment. It interrogates the very
meaning of the popular and hopes to give a sense of its complexity and specificity in
Italian cinema.
The volume seeks to probe the intellectual value of the popular pleasures
mentioned above, and to lead further. To analyse popularity means to consider the
relation of Italian cinema to other forms of art, entertainment, and habits of
everyday existence – and to record some of the tangled battles between radicalism
and Fascism, Marx and God, or art and commerce, in which the popular has been
called to fight. In this, the volume interrogates the popular not only for the joys and
controversies it engenders, but as a key aspect of cultural life. The following chapter
lays out some of the analytical frameworks from which to see it as such. It also takes
into account the ways in which popular Italian cinema has come to be defined and
understood by means of its distinctive relation with its audiences (actual or
imagined). As a whole, this volume sheds light on this relation and some of the
problems that it has traditionally raised in Italy.
Industrial aspects of popularity
Cinema entered Italian life as a technological marvel, a novelty exhibited by
entrepreneurs1 principally in the popular arena of public fairs.2 Thus it was born
amidst a profusion of spectacle, popular narratives, and stage shows (many of which
cinema absorbed and pushed towards obsolescence or second rank), as it was across
much of the rest of the industrialised world. In Italy, this general framework is
inflected by a domestic heritage which includes the circus, opera, dramatisations of
songs (sceneggiate) and, as noted by early film theorist Riciotto Canudo, the
tradition of Roman pantomime (Mosconi, 2006: 48). Avenues for further research
into cinema’s position within popular life include the importance of Sicilian puppet
theatres or non-entertainment practices such as Catholic church services. The
reliance on music and a stylised and emphatic expressivity in these determining
cultural practices is of more than merely historical importance, as it marks the
popular more generally in Italian cinema and can be traced to the emergence of
cinema in a land of lower penetration of the standardised national language than
France, America and Britain (see De Mauro, 1996).
The Italian film industry was established by the 1910s on the success of
historical epics and diva films, with comedies and serials also playing an important
role (see Lottini, this volume). Following collapse in the 1920s, concerted efforts
were made under Fascism to revive the industry through intense use of the
traditionally popular formulae of theatre and romance. Film culture of this period
was also consolidated by emulating and adapting the style of the Hollywood films
that were the most popular in Italy during the 1920s. This emulation was however
modified by national specificities promoted amongst others by Fascist film
authorities aiming to combat Hollywood’s foreign influence: glamour and
ordinariness, the excitement of urban life and consumerism, or the myth of the land
and rural romance conveyed Fascist Italy’s new desire to ‘acquire a modern and
slightly cosmopolitan image as well as to recuperate (and reinforce) traditional […]
values.’ (Hay, 1987: 10)
As part of Fascist interventions into the industry, the Direzione Generale per
la Cinematografia was instituted within the Ministry of Popular Culture. Its main goal
was to foster the Italian film industry's nation-making capacities and international
reputation. The circulation of films was facilitated through an increasingly direct
relationship with social and political institutions such as the OND (Opera Nazionale
Dopolavoro), a state agency whose main aim was the organisation of national leisure
time. By 1938, the OND had 767 cinemas under its supervision whilst also managing
a fleet of ‘cinema wagons’ that showed commercial films as well as government
newsreels across Italy’s regions. The screenings took place outdooors, ‘making the
experience itself an emblem of direct access and communality.’ (Ibid.: 15)
The popularity of cinema in Italy has been partly the result of a very
competitive film industry, but this was never more so than from the 1950s to the
1970s (a period to which many of the chapters below address themselves). Although
the Second World War had a devastating effect, the industry's recovery was
comprehensive. In 1949, Italian films made only 17.3 % of box office receipts. By
1953, they had gone up to 38.2 per cent; in 1960 to 50 %; in 1971 to 65 % (Quaglietti,
1980: 289). Italians became the most frequent attenders at cinemas in Europe: in
1955, Italy had 10,570 screens, compared to the 5,688 in France and the 4,483 in the
UK; in 1977, in Italy the screens were 10,587, whilst in France they were 4,448 and in
the UK 1,510. In 1965, 513 million Italians went to watch films; in that same year,
France had 259 million spectators and the UK 326 million (Corsi, 2001: 124-125). This
was also a period in which the film industry had a remarkable significance for Italy’s
economy. In 1954, cinema constituted almost 1 per cent of total national income
and employed 0.5 per cent of the working population. In Rome, in particular, cinema
was the second largest industry after the construction industry. (Wagstaff, 1995: 97)
Fig. 1.1: A crowded screening at the Cinema Adua, Turin (1941)
During this period of growth, an extraordinary number of skilled technicians,
talented producers and writers developed and became absorbed into the production
of films based on popular formulae. These filoni, a category which is distinguished
from genre by the much shorter timescale in which they exist, found great popularity
both abroad and in Italy, making the 1950s to the 1970s a period in which the Italian
domestic market was partly wooed away from American films. The domestic market
flourished also thanks to the expansion of cinemas in the provinces and in the
working class metropolitan neighborhoods where most of the popular genre films
made in Italy were being shown. As Christopher Wagstaff (1992) has noted, Italy
became in this period an exporter of popular genre films to a greater degree than
ever. The international circulation of prestigious neorealist exports was first eclipsed
– in box-office terms – by mythological epics such as the sword-and-sandal film and
then the Spaghetti Westerns. In 1946, no Italian film was imported into the UK, but
by 1960 the UK became a significant importer of popular Italian adventure formula
films for its B-movie market. South America and the Middle East also became
important export markets, all of which complicates the extent to which Italian
popular cinema was for Italians (see Wagstaff, this volume).
Various trends coalesced in the mid-1970s to bring an end to this industrial
pre-eminence: notably, the partial removal of protectionist measures, state
subsidies and support to the industry; the withdrawal of much American money and
the move by Hollywood to saturation-selling of blockbusters; and increasing
competition from television. The decline in the industry was stark:
From 1975 to 1985, the number of moviegoers decreased by
almost 400 million. In the 1990s, that number dropped below 100
million tickets sold annually. By 1985, the number of working
screens dropped from 6,500 to 3,400 and by the year 2000, that
number fell to 2,400. While 230 films were produced in 1975, only
80 were made in 1985. (Brunetta, 2003: 256)
The production, exhibition and export of popular films remains the staple of the
Italian industry, although one which is much reduced compared to the first three
decades after the war (for discussion of contemporary cinema, see Galt, and O’Leary,
both this volume).
Popular utopia
Popularity in the cinema is judged only in its most empirical form by box
office numbers and production figures. What is striking is how often the
transformation of public life wrought by the popularity of cinema is thought of as
signalling a route to utopia; and not only in the opportunities allowed to
entrepreneurs for fast, vast riches. Experiments in the early days of the feature film
in structuring utopia into film spectatorship informed the creation of the politeama,
'a special theatre all'italiana...attended by a socially heterogeneous public, and
representing an indifferentiated space par excellence... Its architectural variety can
be connected to the expressive variety of the show.' (Mosconi, 2006: 133)3
Although these theatres became obsolete, the offer of universality and community
remains central to marketing the film experience, both of indivual films and of
cinemagoing as a general practice. Analysis of interwar film posters, for example,
shows how the promised experience is one that: ‘enables an escape from reality
together with the feeling of being part of a collective, which turns, unmistakeably,
into a public.' (Ibid.: 262)4
Cinema’s place in public life became from the 1910s onwards an issue of
national political importance. The King attended the 40th anniversary celebration of
cinema in 1935, an event promoted by a Mussolini impressed by cinema's 'character
of universality' (1928, cited in Brunetta 2000a: 34).5 The matter of cinema’s
popularity did not pass unremarked upon by God’s representatives on Earth, Pope
Pius XI decreeing that 'the cinema occupies a place amongst modern entertainments
of universal importance... [and] of the most popular form of entertainment in times
of leisure, not just for the rich but for all classes of society' (1936, cited in Mosconi,
2006: 249).6 It is notions of universality and popularity, of the utopian possibilities
enabled by the technology of cinema and the collective aspect of its spectatorship,
that feed into post-war neorealist hopes for cinema as a tool for popular
emancipation.
Ways of thinking that insist on universality can also be linked to the Vatican's
catholic ambitions. As well as this they are rooted in the reality of a country which at
least until the boom of the 1960s was felt as having only partially advanced towards
the industrialised modernity which gives rise to a differentiated working class culture.
Taking the idea of the power of cinema further, frequently across its history the
allure of the silver screen has evoked a sense that cinema contains for the popular
masses something magical (whether for good or otherwise). In a country only newly
adapting to mass society from the conditions of semi-feudal agriculture, cinema is
seen as creating 'a new kind of regular ritual' (Brunetta, 2000a: 39),7 the cinema
theatre according to Pio XII the 'church of the modern man in the big cities' (1943,
cited in Mosconi, 2006: 270-1).8 The much repeated reports of hysteria and
worship that greeted the early divas contribute to a perception of cinema as able to
create new bevhaviour and identity at a mass level. Models of spectatorship that
grant cinema near-mystical powers to induce conformity have left their traces often problematically - not only on official mistrust of the form, but on discussion of
the ideological effects of popular cinema, which will be discussed further below.
The uses of popularity
The idea of a mass audience unified in a non-rational public experience has
engendered much official desire to harness the imputed power of cinema. This
desire is felt first of all in an aspiration towards artistic quality (emerging from
anxiety over the lack of cultural legitimacy of a popularly comprehensible
entertainment born in the travelling fair). The early Italian feature film originated in
the move away from fairground novelty into patriotic celebrations of national
endeavour and adaptations of canonised literary works including those of Dante,
D'Annunzio, and the life of Pinocchio, thereby contributing to a valuation of cinema
through reference to national heritage.9 To this end, the first Venice film festival in
1932 was set up as inaugurating an art to be judged by experts and to avoid vulgarity.
Italian conceptions of art exhibit the intellectual influence of Benedetto Croce,
whose idealist views endowed upon culture an improving purpose: cinema is thus
granted the objective of raising the cultural level of the nation, even of creating a
national culture itself – of ‘making Italians’, as the phrase has it – within a country
late to unify. (Colombo, 1998: 16)
As Piredda points out in this volume, the Vatican's forays into filmmaking can
most be felt in attempts for moral education. Pius XI used cinema's popularity to call
on the industry to ensure a cinema that was 'moral, moralising, educative' (cited
Mosconi, 2006b: 81).10 Both the taste-making and the moralising ambitions of
official interventions in popular cinema culture view cinema as an instrument, an
image which was militarised in the language of the Fascist regime whose repeated
dictum was that the cinema was 'our strongest weapon'.11
Fascist intellectuals were decided upon whom they were providing cinema
for: rather than for a restricted cultural elite, 'we make cinema for the people, for
the masses.' (Pavolini, 1940, cited in Carabba, 1974: 145)12 In fact, in Mass Culture
and Italian Society, David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle (2007) have discussed the
1930s as a decisive stage in the formation of an era of mass culture in Italy. They
argue that during this period culture industries such as cinema were powerful forces
at play within the public arena, where they fostered an increasing awareness for
Italian audiences of belonging to a national community.
Fascist authorities were sensitive enough adjudicators of public taste to know
that 'the public invariably gets bored with films that try to educate them' (Bottei, a
prominent Fascist speaking in favour of the 1931 cinema law, cited in Brunetta,
2000b: 343).13 To be useful popular cinema has to be enjoyed, recognition of which
meant that the resulting film output of the Fascist period was principally of the kinds
of entertainment described above, rather than of direct propaganda.
Consideration of Fascist film policy allows re-evaluation of how
totalitarianism works in popular culture, complicating ascription of any simplistic or
direct interaction of society/ideas/culture. In fact one can find a politics of
opposition within the emphasis in the Fascist era on representations of popular,
national, ordinariness. In the pages in particular of the journal Cinema (in which the
involvement of Il duce's son Vittorio Mussolini enabled the indulgence of some left-
wing discussion of culture), the people, detached from wealth or status, become
movers in an unstated class war: future neorealist director De Santis found the
reason to praise Blasetti for his 'poetry of a country whose true humanity is with the
people' (1942, in 1982: 102).14 This anti-Fascist film culture was the embryo of
neorealism, finally born at the downfall of Fascism from a belief that cinema has an
ethical purpose granted by its ability to record popular reality (even if 'emptying the
idea of the people of its real class content and giving it a mythic unity' (Brunetta,
1975: 17)15).
The intersection of class, nation and popolo is in this post-war period of
radical engagement (impegno) highly influenced by the Communist Party founder
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the ‘national-popular’ (1985). Gramsci coins this
concept in the context of his critique of the ‘aristocratic’ position of Italian
intellectuals towards the culture traditionally consumed by the people. In their ivory
tower, Gramsci argues, the Italian intellectuals have traditionally dismissed the
culture consumed by the people as primitive and naïve. Gramsci calls for a new
generation of intellectuals able to produce culture for the people, but only following
a true process of identification of their needs. For Gramsci, this culture must not only
be permeated with popular sentiment but must be conducive to strengthening a
sense of national belonging among the people. The national-popular, then,
represents for Gramsci a political project for a kind of culture which the people
might recognise as their own, which may make them feel part of one nation and
which may lead them to their social and political emancipation.
Arguably, it was neorealism that most consistently tried to absorb and
develop the Gramscian lesson by producing a kind of cinema that drew on people’s
stories, on their aspirations and on their sufferings in the years of post-war
reconstruction. But to consider the influence of Gramsci’s notion of national-popular
on Italian cinema means also to take into account the work of politically progressive
directors such as Giuseppe De Santis, Franco Rosi and Elio Petri and their ambition to
make films of popular appeal that could provide an understanding of particular
conditions of social and economic oppression and elicit a collective self-empowering
response.
Gramsci’s influential place in Italy’s intellectual life has often been
interpreted through national preoccupations concerning the function of cinema to
provide the people with unifying popular imagery. To put it simply, the ‘national’
part of Gramsci’s formulation has often obfuscated the ‘popular’ within Italian film
scholarship. Another effect of Gramsci’s prominence in Italy has been a certain
prescriptivism about the kind of progressive popular cinema that should be
promoted by critics; namely, an insistence on realism. A revealing example is Vittorio
Spinazzola’s volume Cinema e pubblico (1985). Here, Spinazzola makes a distinction
between two categories of popular cinema: (1) films made about the people and (2)
films made for the people. The former are for Spinazzola films which show the
collective dramas and aspirations of the people and are to be considered the most
commendable forms of popular cinema (neorealist cinema); the latter are films
which privilege escapism, spectacle and serialised entertainment (melodramas,
comedies, epic dramas), thus failing to fulfill the mimetic function of art that
constitutes the basis for the formation of a collective will among the people. (1985:
7) Spinazzola’s book represents an instance of the somewhat crude distinction that
has permeated Italian film scholarship for quite some time between edifying,
progressive cinema for the people on the one hand and debasing, de-politicised
products for popular consumption on the other.
While neorealism was felt to have failed to engage a popular audience, the
commercial cinema that surrounded it was seen for some time as a return to a
cinema di regime of the kind that was believed to have upheld Fascism (for an
example of this argument see Tinazzi, 1979). This understanding of the political
function of popular cinema has come under criticism for offering a
model of ideology as a form of displaced political domination…This model
fails to take account of the way in which ideologies…involve people in a
very active way, picking up on real (not illusory) dissatisfactions and
aspirations and mobilising them in support of this or that policy. It also
ascribes to ideologies a political instrumentality and coherence which in real
situations they rarely seem to possess. (Forgacs 1990: 82)
The critique that any cinema which fails adequately to confront reality was evasive
and so automatically of political use to the status quo – whether under Fascist or
democratic government – is also an example of a formalist conception of the
political possibilities of non-realist entertainment cinema which can at times seem to
reject popular cinema for the very fact of being pleasureable.
The oppositions within 1950s film culture came out in a most extended way
in the debate in the pages of Communist daily newspaper L'Unità. Filmmaker Alberto
Lattuada defended his film The Bandit/Il bandito (1946) from being liked too much
by the public ‘in the names of [Alessandro] Blasetti, [Giuseppe] De Santis, [Pietro]
Germi and many other colleagues who seek a lively contact with the public’ as not
wanting to be in an ivory tower ‘abandoned in the desert’ (Lattuada 1999: 103).16
Providing a valuable analysis of the formal and cultural qualities that can explain
popularity at any given moment, Raffaello Matarazzo – whose domestic melodramas
were a starting point in the ascendance of post-war commercial cinema –
contributed to the debate by maintaining that
what [the public] loves most is seeing how, through the workings of
fate and by correcting wrongheadedness, within the limits that humanity
makes possible, or thanks to resignation when struggle is vain, a happy
ending, [and] a more human and bearable life, can be reached. That is,
[popular films offer] hope, hope in a better world. (Matarazzo, 1955: 967)17
In this context of political engagement, national education, and realist
mission, the value of entertainment in its own right – a value this volume maintains
– was met with palpable defensiveness. Aware that reality - not fantasy, desire, or
spectacle – was the highest goal sought after in post-war critical culture, scriptwriter
Ennio Flajano defended his film of revue performances The Firemen of Viggiu/I
pompieri di Viggiù (1949) from critics with the semi-serious objetion that it showed
the reality of variety theatre (D'Amico, 2008: 64). Director Antonio Pietrangeli said of
his comedy Fantasmi a Roma (1961) that 'it aims to make the audience laugh, but
the way our fantasies play out can help us understand some of the mechanisms of
our epoch' (1961, cited in Pellizzari, 1999: 212),18 his 'but' indicating the more
general conception that making the audience laugh is not itself sufficient.
Fig. 1.2: Poster for Don Camillo e l’onorevole Peppone (1955) parodying the
post-war struggle for cultural hegemony between Italian Communists and the
Catholic Church
The period of Italian cinema’s greatest popular success was one in which
both the Communist left and Christian centre-right19 saw film criticism as a crucial
element in popular influence. Made between 1952 and 1965, the Don Camillo and
Peppone film series (Fig. 1.2) – which followed the bickering of a Catholic priest and
a Communist mayor for moral and ideological control of their small community in
northern Italy – are interesting examples of how this struggle was also present
within the popular film culture of the post-war period. Despite a sometimes
hectoring tone within the critical atmosphere of the era (a tone not entirely absent
from contemporary critics who decry past parti pris), this engagement is a sign that
'film was the art form that was nearest society in Italy, depicting ordinary people and
situations and [being] a source of education during social transformations.' (Gundle
1990: 195-6) In other words, popular film was seen really to matter, to be an issue of
daily moral, philosophical, and artistic concern. The makers of the most popular films
of the period engaged directly with debate to define the purpose of an
entertainment form that had achieved greater reach than any other in history.
Perhaps it is straying into elegiac notes to suggest that the relatively more detached
scholarly analysis which this volume embodies is enabled by an extended period
where cinema has simply not had the same cultural and political importance in Italy.
L’angoscia del popolare
The negative judgement conferred on popular cinema forms a kind of
radicalised Kantianism which prizes detachment in the belief that emotional
engagement counts out critical thought. In this conception, cinema is '[a] narcotic
device for reducing the spectators' tastes to the lowest level and annulling all (or
nearly all) their critical faculties.' (Brunetta: 478)20 Such a position seems
established to combat the uncontrollable and surely suspect experience of popular
pleasures for their own sake – to combat 'the anxiety, angst, the fear of the
"popular" in Italian culture.' (Menon, 1999: 327)21 Anxieties about the status of the
popular have occupied a central place within Italian film criticism: Catherine O’Rawe
(2008: 180), for example, refers to the frequent distinction made in the L’Unità
debate between the popolo in the Gramscian sense of workers and peasants and the
pubblico, the passive consumer of entertainment.
Within the context of such anxiety, it is popularity itself which is the object of
criticism: the genre films of post-war cinema are criticised because they are seen to
signal 'the phase of neorealism’s “popularisation”, inserting more or less garish
novelistic and melodramatic elements into the sincerity of the investigation’
(Castello, 1956: 19),22 belonging to a 'provincial, cockney Italy [beneath which] lies
narrative inconsistency and moral poverty.' (Morando Morandini, 1958 cited in
Grande, 1986: 115-6)23 Rather than confer value upon emotion, theatricality, and
display, the elements constituting popularity are understood as formally connected
to a popular worldview of degraded moral capacity which the films both satisfy and
further reproduce.
It would be hard to criticise the radical project of Marxist-inspired film critics
for expressing anger at acceptance of society as it was; what is of note however is
how often film critics in the post-war era who took a position on the left were
opposed to optimism itself. It was Christian Democrat MP Giulio Andreotti who
called for a 'healthy and constructive optimism'.24 Rather than see popular desires to
escape from reality as indicating the potential to change things, criticism was
expressed in L'Unità of the 'dangerous pseudorealism of the various Bread, Love
and... films and of the whole "optimistic" series' (Feretti, 1955: 96).25 In this,
Communists found themselves allied with the Vatican's critique of mainstream
culture, for it was Padre Baragli who criticised happy endings for placing false
measures for reality in the hearts of the flock (1956, cited in Treveri-Gennari, 2009:
77).
Popular, art, and auteurism
The perceived popular failure of neorealism is itself a critical constructon
which chooses to focus on the poor reception of La terra trema (1948) and Umberto
D. (1952) rather than the commercial success of many other films of the era (see
Wagstaff in this volume). Although it became common in criticism to complain of the
sparsity of 'isolated authors and works [which are] artistically and culturally valid'
(Torri, 1979: 44),26 the unprecedented health of post-war film culture was far from
based on the opposition of arthouse and auteur products to commercial genre
cinema. One need only think of the roots of Fellini in comedy, of Visconti in
melodrama, the sharing of production crews of scriptwriters, composers, editors at
the Roman studios of Cinecittà to conceive of the relationship of popular to art
cinema as one of mutual productiveness.
The problem in disdaining 'the most superficial appetites of the people in the
stalls across the globe' (Castello, 1989: 40)27 is the risk of isolation from the very
masses who are the topic of concern. Categorisation of popular cinema as 'the
evasive and consolatory tradition of a cinema of fairytales and tricksters of the stalls'
(Micciché, 1999a: xi)28 actually itself produces - conceptually at least - a critical
disempowerment of the audience, whose members are seen as dominated by the
cultural artefacts they choose to enjoy. This conception of audience helplessness is
glimpsed in the negative references, which continue beyond those selected for this
paragraph, to the ‘stalls’ (platee), their physical position below the theatrical stage
evoking a spatial relationship of the audience’s subjugation (pubblico – connected to
notions of the marketplace and political power – being the phrase in use for a more
demanding, if consumerist, spectator). Popular passions thus fail to ignite in a
situation in which 'the more a film disrupts fixed conventions, languages, formulae
and ideas the harder it finds it to conquer the stalls.' (Argentieri, 1989: 190)29
Popular cinema, in short, did not win over the critical establishment in the
post-war era. In finding reasons why, one can note that the dominant conception of
popular cinema is of a superficial experience peripheral to the true centre of life. So
the problem in popular comedy (for example) is judged to be how in such films,
'"reality" becomes a toy, a show' (Zagarrio, 1989: 107)30 representing 'affectations
and mystifications, games in front of a pleasantly distorting mirror.' (Carabba, 1999:
396)31 As well as occupying a peripheral position and distracting people from what is
important in life, commercialised frivolity is criticised for involving an unthinking
immediacy: its craftsmanship is 'simply of a "culinary" type' (Torri, 1979: 41)32, its
status that of 'consumable goods' (Tinazzi, 1979: 19).33 The popular nature of
entertainment is thereby downgraded intellectually to a directly physical act of
consumo (distinct from an auteur cinema di qualità).
To criticise popular cinema for its fantastical tendencies can however involve
problematic assumptions about the given nature of art's relationship to reality.
Added to this, the consumption model becomes a metaphor which is stretched to
the point where it swallows up its original meaning. While it is true that film is a
consumer item if viewing it involves buying a ticket to enter a theatre, this refers no
less to arthouse cinema than it does to genre cinema. The metaphor aims instead to
define a cinema that is identical to the last, which is ingested, and has a nutirtional
value; which, furthermore, is low. None of this of course is literally true. In fact, ideas
of consumption can serve to hide a refusal to engage with the popular, typified in
Adornoan assertions that ‘under monopoly all mass culture is identical’ (Adorno,
1989: 41): a statement so wildly untrue as to not merit mention but for the highly
influential example it gives of the critical erasure of the reality of the popular.
Much debate rests on whether the culture industry can be viewed as
standardised and therefore lacking artistic merit; drawing on film genre theory,
Maggie Günsberg defines the system at work in Italian cinema as one offering
‘difference and repetition.’ (2005: 3) In other words, the film industry establishes
particular formulae and star personae with popular appeal but which develop as
each new film invents different and unexpected situations. It is the work of cultural
analysis to determine and discuss which elements are repeated and which are
different in any given artwork: suffice it to repeat a basis of genre theory for our
purposes here, which is that unlike the car or tinned food production-lines to which
its methods can in useful ways be compared, each new film is an appreciably
different item from the last. The promise of new and fantastic productions marks a
difference between popular cinema and the folk culture of earlier times, involving as
it did repeated songs and tales produced live and non-industrially. What is also
worth mentioning here is how in relation to Italian cinema novelty has even been
taken as definitional of the character of the popular during modernity: unlike folk,
'the popular is dinstinguished by the distance it takes from tradition, displaying
instead a clear desire for innovation.' (Villa, 2002: 190)34
A point can be made here about the process of categorisation in relation to
popular cinema. The constitution of popular cinema and its relationship to or
exclusivity from art cinema occurs through the practices of representatives of official
culture as well as according to qualities intrinsic to the artwork. With this in mind,
the history of Italian cinema shows that the policing of the boundaries around
popular cinema is an activity which may be carried out by Vatican or Fascist officials
or by 'an elite which calls itself leftwing' (Aprà, 1976: 9).35 A further, related issue in
conceptualising popular cinema concerns the appropriateness of judgements on the
very category, criteria and purpose used to analyse popular cinema (the division
between art and popular being one which Galt re-considers in this volume). The
context of circuses, fairs, and variety halls in whose lineage popular cinema stands
offers a rather different perspective than those perspectives mentioned above which
allege a failure to analyse reality. The pursual by popular cinema of similar strategies
to songs, emblems and icons which are dramatic, entertaining, and/or emotionally
involving is from this perspective a source of strength. It may be arguable that such
properties are bad for the health, but then critical dismay has to be not with any
particular period or model of popular cinema but with the ontology of popularity
itself (a dismay which however offers poor chances for the possibility of the people's
emancipation).
The challenge of the 'new criticism'
Seeking a way out of the methodological impasse which radical criticism had
reached in the post-war era, Viganò asked:
Is a film auteurist because it negates its theatrical and industrial origins? Is it
evasive when it is not made for explicit political and pedagogical aims? To maintain
this would mean to replace critical analysis of films with verbal formulae [and]
ignore the fact that every representation is always also a transformation of the
represented object... (1977, cited in
Grande, 1986: 116)36
His comments form part of the challenge posed by the 'new criticism' of the 1970s.
The first aspect of this challenge was a reconsideration of the radicalism of
neorealism itself (see Cannella, 1973). Another occurred at the Pesaro conference of
1974 and the decision to view, for the first time since the war, a number of films
from the Fascist era (see Savio's Ma l'amore no for the first published book-length
re-evalution of Fascist cinema). In all, the attempt of the 1974 conference was to exit
from the dichotomy of 'conservative mythmaking... and schizoid iconoclasm.'
(Micciché, 1999b (1979): 5)37
This new attitude towards the popular was also the result of a way of
engaging with the challenges of mass culture elaborated following the publication of
Umberto Eco’s Apocalittici e integrati (1964) (published in English as Apocalypse
Postponed). In his infuential refutation of Adornoan pessimism, Eco argues that it is
extremely important to attempt a concrete study of mass culture products in order
to render visible their structural characteristics and investigate how they are
consumed by people. This approach, Eco maintains, is preferable to the attitude of
the critic who negates these products en bloc, thus leaving the meanings of their
appeal totally unchallenged. Eco’s work has been crucial in encouraging scholars
towards a greater understanding of the contradictions of commercially successful
cinema. It has helped to challenge the influence of Adorno and Horkhemeier’s
‘domination theories’ and their construction of audiences as passive unsuspecting
masses. Our hope is that this volume will likewise chart some of the ambivalences of
popular cultural production and reception in Italy.
The international intellectual climate of the 1970s was one in which notions
of both authorship and cinema's relationship to reality were challenged, by poststructuralism amongst other currents. It is also when film studies became instituted
as an intellectual discipline, alongside the development of cultural studies (a term
which is left untranslated from the English when discussed in Italian). As well as this,
interest turned towards analyses of popular film by means of genre studies, its
representation both of reality and of different identity groups, and of pleasure in the
cinema. Culture is here understood as a negotiation (Gledhill, 2006) and identity as
residing not in a supposedly authentic condition of the popular classes but being a
social process in continual development and re-definition - not least through the
practices of culture itself (Hall, 1989).
The politics of rehabilitation and the place of this book
In Italy, the polemic for a rediscovery of popular cinema asserted that the
post-war obsession with neorealism has obscured the 'plebean' origins of cinema,
forgetting 'the fair in name of the museum.' (Aprà, 1976: 10)38 In this conception,
It is not La Terra Trema that signals the end of the 1940s, like some would
banally believe, but Catene, and the two alternatives in 1954 were not
Senso and La Strada, as those of impoverished soul believed in those dark
times, but Senso and Casa Ricordi.' (Micciché, 1999b (1979): 4)39
Who better to reconsider, then, than the 'ultrapopular' Raffaello Matarazzo (Aprà
and Carabba, 1976), whose enormously commercially successful films signalled the
re-establishment of the post-war film industry.
Aprà's groundbreaking analysis is one which examines the energies, types,
and excesses of the dramatic world of Matarazzo's cinema, thereby finding a mode
through which to unite aesthetic and social analysis which moves beyond allegation
of evasion and mystification. Similarly, Maurizio Grande’s re-reading of Italian
comedy concludes that 'the characters in popular comedy [are] balanced between
acceptance and refusal, between pushing forward and frustration.' (Grande, 1979:
170)40 Grande thus provides a route to understanding the popularity of cinema in
the particular configurations and situations it creates that help individuals
understand their relationship to society and historical change.
To widen the scope of scholarship on Italian cinema beyond the auteur and
neorealist canons is certainly an objective that this volume endorses. It does so,
however, by being careful not to reinforce precisely that polarised film history that
places the art film canon (which has been allegedly studied over and over) on one
side and on the other the lower forms of film production (that still need to be
studied and appreciated). Such an agenda mirrors too closely one of the major ways
in which popular Italian cinema has been tackled, that is to say through the politics
of rehabilitation. This scholarly practice is based on questioning the dismissal of
certain strands of popular film production (individual directors, films or genres) in
order to demonstrate that they are much more complex (if not sophisticated) than
was previously thought. In 2004, the Venice film festival hosted the retrospective
Italian Kings of the Bs. Introduced by Quentin Tarantino, the retrospective
celebrated a range of low-budget films including horror films, polizieschi and sex
comedies made between the 1950s and 1970s. Tarantino himself declared that
Italian B movies had been especially influential on him, a point that he forcefully
reiterated when he came back to the Venice film festival in 2010 to compete with his
Inglorious Basterds. So successful has this process been that the retrospective
travelled to the Tate Modern in 2006 and Italian B movie directors (Dario Argento in
2009; Ruggero Deodato in 2011; Enzo Castellari and Sergio Martino in 2012) are
regularly invited to Cine-Excess, the annual international conference on global cult
cinema which takes place in London.
The practice of rehabilitation is nevertheless far from unproblematic. The
‘rehabilitated’ popular film runs the risk of being incorporated within another
circumscribed category (another canon if you like). In a recent essay, Raffaele Meale
points out that the rehabilitation of popular cinema represents one of most
important aspects of the recent critical debate on the state of Italian cinema. But
what Meale means is the rehabilitation of the work of ‘Mario Bava, Antonio
Margheriti, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Aldo Lado, Riccardo Freda Fernando di Leo,
Sergio Martino and so on.’ (Meale 2009: 44)41 One cannot ignore the inevitable
exclusions that are produced by the practice of rehabilitation here: less masculine
genres such as melodrama or the opera film are overlooked; hence the
reconstitution of a particular popular canon that goes under the aegis of cult film. As
well as this, the pleasures of laughter and comedy, towards which Italian film
criticism has been traditionally suspicious (as Sergio Rigoletto and Alan O’Leary
argue in this volume), continues to remain a rather contentious area of debate in
Italian film scholarship.
This volume aims to move towards an open hypothesis about what popular
Italian cinema may look like; we contend that the objective of scholarship on popular
Italian cinema should be to engage with a wider variety of film forms that may count
as popular entertainment whilst also interrogating the relation of these forms with
the art canon (see Galt, and Rigoletto, in particular). Within the varied range of
frameworks on offer for understanding the popular, care has also been taken not to
forget the value of the projects of class and popular emancipation that have so
enlivened Italian film criticism. In this volume, Rosalind Galt points out that the fixed
idea of an art/popular dyad in critical discourse tends to valorise the extremes at
either ends, but occludes the films in the middle which according to her ‘form an
influential contemporary mode’.
A recent theorisation of popular cinema can be found in La scena rubata by
Paola Valentini, taken from the standpoint of three oppositions: that popular
is opposed to mass as something authentic is compared to that
which is
naive, banal, or plainly commercial; as well as this, popular is
anonymous and diffuse, rather than having the unmistakeable uniqueness
of the auteur; popular, finally, is opposed to elite. (2002: 13)42
A further aspect of popular cinema is its hybridity, and its artefacts often
vaunt not their individual status but their place within a range of entertainments.
The connection of film to other popular forms is made in the 1995 Comunicazioni
sociali special edition on popular Italian cinema in the 1950s. In this collection,
popular cinema is connected to the serialised literature of nineteenth century
through the photostories of the cineromanzo (Belloni and De Berti, 1995), the postwar melodramas of Matarazzo to Catholic icon painting (Lietti, 1995), and, via the
device of the voiceover in post-war comedy, to radio shows and popular pleasure in
storytelling (Villa, 1995). In this volume, Irene Lottini, Richard Dyer and Reka Buckley
make use of this approach by discussing some of the productive exchanges at play
between popular cinematic production on the one hand and theatre, opera, fashion,
and variety on the other.
The multilayered relation between contemporary Italian cinema and
television (especially from the 1970s onwards) substantiates the usefulness of this
inter-medial approach. One of the distincive features of Italian film production of the
last forty years has been the potential of the films for repeated and intense
exploitation on the TV circuit after their cinema releases. This is partly due to the Rai
cinema-Medusa duopoly which, together with the American majors, controls over
80% of the Italian film market. This duopoly is reflected in the even more powerful
control that their sister companies (state channels Rai and the Berlusconi-owned
Mediaset) have on Italian TV (Ghelli, 2009). Bearing in mind the closeness between
these two media in contemporary Italy may be useful in unpacking the popular
imagery that is currently consumed by film audiences nationwide. Guido Bonsaver
ventures to suggest that ‘the popularity of the cinepanettoni [is] to some extent
ensured by the fact that a similar formula, based on scantily dressed women and
escapist, low-level comedy, is at the base of a whole range of popular television
programmes in both state and private television’ (2010: 288). In his essay on the
cinepanettone, Alan O’Leary explores the appeal of what constitutes today the most
commercially successful film formula in Italy.
Recent years have seen English language scholarship include popular genres
within accounts of the history of Italian cinema. In a reflection of this shift Peter
Bondanella’s A History of Italian Cinema had by its fourth edition removed the
subtitle ‘From Neorealism to the Present’ and been revised to include chapters on
the peplum, commedia all’italiana, horror, giallo, Spaghetti Western and the
poliziesco. (Bondanella, 2009) Similarly, it is now standard to include at least the
popular cinema of the post-war period and mention of the filoni in any account of
Italian cinema.43 The first extended attempt to deal with the popular as a concept
within Italian cinema can be found in Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a
Post-war Society (Brizio-Skov, 2012). Sticking to the three decades after the war, the
book analyses film to the extent that its popularity 'meets emotional needs of
spectator' (ibid.: 2), emphasising the need for 'reading' film 'texts' as they produce
'messages' which act to 'bind' the spectator to the dominant order. Therefore the
peplum, for example, is seemingly 'relatively insignificant' (ibid.: 11) but this is shown
not to be the case through reference to extra-filmic questions of culture and history.
Brizio-Skov places cinema within a Gramscian 'popular culture born from the
people for the people.' (Ibid.: 10) What must be of particular concern however is to
determine the complex of interpretive and artistic intricacies that lie in the
conundrum of a cultural product which is industrially produced (and therefore not
directly of the people like folk songs or stories are), and yet which forms an integral at times the principal - medium of their cultural activity.
An underlying claim within the volume here is that the popular is a field with
manifold connections to a range of aspects of daily life which, as the history of the
debates outlined above suggest, is continually re-constituted in a permanent and
always only partial process of redefinition. Added to this, the chapters below seek
not to take a filmic text as existing as an answer to a particular pre-defined need nor
as possessing a life of its own, pushing or binding the spectator. Film is instead the
mid-point in a dynamic interaction between spectator and social context, one which
helps construct new needs through the creative invention of emotional experiences
that do not pre-exist the viewing of a film. This results in an emphasis on film
analysis in the scholarship contained here, performed alongside other aspects of
new research so as to understand one principal aspect of film: that its popularity is
based, first and foremost, in creating states of pleasure, affect, and engagement
which are reconducible before all else to the unique experience of film itself.
The chapters that follow draw on a variety of methods of scholarship by
academics based in Italian, UK and US institutions. In his chapter 'Italian Cinema,
Popular?' Christopher Wagstaff turns round the grammar framing this volume's
investigation. He does so to question the bases of how we understand Italian cinema
as popular - and whether we can understand it as such at all. His entry thus acts as a
companion to this chapter, completing an introductory section on the notion of
popularity itself.
In 'The Prettiness of Italian Cinema', Galt coins the category of the popular
art film to discuss films such as Cinema Paradiso (1989), Mediterraneo (1991) and Io
non ho paura/I’m not Scared (2003). These are films which draw from popular
genres and which have been very commercially successful both in Italy and abroad
but which often circulate both nationally and internationally as prestige productions.
She thereby contributes a major theorisation reconceptualising aesthetic categories
and the relationship of popular to arthouse cinema.
Musical performance is a principal aspect of Italian cinema and since the
coming of sound a central facet of its popularity; Richard Dyer discusses what he
refers to as 'The Pervasiveness of Song in Italian Cinema' and by so doing provides a
wider account of the incorporation of theatrical forms in Italian film history, as well
as particularities in Italian methods of film scoring, and the relationship thus
established between artifice and reality.
In 'Melodrama as Seriousness' Louis Bayman understands melodrama, a key
form in Italian cinema, through the possibilities it opens up for particular modes of
expression. He argues that melodrama formed the principal form through which, for
a certain period, Italian cinema expressed seriousness. This seriousness can be seen
through the aesthetic strategies of melodrama and in the relationship it establishes
between cinema and other central aspects of Italian life - the family, the Church, and
opera, amongst others.
Along with song and melodrama, comedy is another of the motifs present
throughout Italian cinema. In 'Moving Masculinity: Incest Narratives in Italian Sex
Comedies', Tamao Nakahara discusses erotiv comedy of the 1970s, and in particular
the pathos surrounding the male protagonist. Typically young and inetto, she
considers how the processes of identification with this figure can be read against
generational shifts occurring contemporaneously in Italian society.
In ‘Laughter and the Popular in Lina Wertmüller’s The Seduction of Mimì’,
Sergio Rigoletto considers the work of one of the most commercially successful
Italian directors of the 1970s. Rigoletto examines Wertmüller’s idiosyncratic use of
gendered laughter in her first international box office hit and some of the
reservations expressed by critics about its degrading effect. In unpacking the idea of
comic degradation in critical discouse, he demonstrates how Wertmüller’s particular
use of laughter mocks and undoes the same allegedly conservative pleasures for
which her films tend to be dismissed.
Taking a different approach to gender and the cinema of the 1970s, Alex
Marlow-Mann discusses a prolific but rather intellectually neglected filone, the
poliziesco. His 'Strategies of Tension: Towards a Re-Interpretation of Enzo G.
Castellari's The Big Racket' considers the processes of violent revenge. Working from
the philosophy of emotion provided by Robert Solomon, he proposes the possibility
that rather than offering proto-Fascist responses to the crisis of Italian society in the
1970s, crime films produce ambiguous possibilities regarding catharsis and justice.
Moving the historical focus to the emergence of the star system, Irene Lottini
in 'Il delirio del lungo metraggio: Cinema as Mass Phenomenon in Early Twentieth
Century Italian Cinema' places film within a context of urban modernity. Hers is thus
a piece of scholarship which places cinema amongst the intoxicating phantasmagoria
of the city street, tracing cinema's self-reflexivity about the experience it offers as
one of consumerist delight.
Réka Buckley is similarly interested in the models offered by cinema for
glamour and consumer habits, specifically through the establishment of Italian
fashion as a world leader through the cinema of the post-war era. Her chapter
'Dressing the Part: 'Made in Italy' Goes to the Movies with Lucia Bosé in Chronicle of
a Love Affair' uses her case study to lay out the connections between the film and
fashion industries and the meanings this can bring to the understanding of film.
Discussing a different industry, that of bodybuilding, Daniel O'Brien writes on
the filone of the peplum in 'Hercules versus Hercules: Variation and Continuation in
Two Generations of Heroic Masculinity'. In his analysis, he considers the relationship
between bodybuilding magazines, American culture, and Italian masculinity, probing
what the different forms and fortunes of two film versions of the Hercules myth can
tell us about changes in Italian society from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Returning to comedy, but moving into the contemporary era, Alan O'Leary's
chapter 'On the Complexity of the Cinepanettone' analyses both the most
commercially succesfull and most critically derided films of the current industry, the
Christmas comedies known as the cinepanettone. Taking Bakhtin as his theoretical
inspiration, he polemicises for the cinepanettone as a playfully subversive and
complex form.
Francesca Piredda focusses on a much lesser-known aspect of popular Italian
cinema, films made in the silent era by priests, in 'Cinema and Popular Preaching: the
Italian Missionary Film and Fiamme'. She discusses how the codes of the American
Western were used by the missionaries in a film which aimed to spread word of the
Catholic vision of the civilisation of the wilderness and conversion of the heathens.
Finally, Mark Goodall discusses 'The Italian Mondo Documentary Film', a
strain of often sensational and shocking collections of images and scenes from
around the world. In so doing he charts the place of the mondo film in the transition
from 1960s liberalisation into the modern media culture of Italy.
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Endnotes
1
A model of production that remained the main method of raising finance in the Italian
industry.
2
For comments on the panoply of modern visual media at the point of cinema's
invention, see Casetti, 1999
3
'un particolare luogo di spettacolo 'all'italiana'... frequentato da un pubblico
socialmente eterogeneo, che rappresenta il luogo di spettacolo indifferenziato per
eccellenza...l'eteronomia architettonica dello spazio si coniuga all'eteronomia'
espressiva dello spettacolo.'
4
'consenta di evadere dalla realta', e insieme di riconoscere in una collettivita', ormai
divenuta inequivocabilmente, pubblico.'
5
'carattere d'universalità'
6
'tra i divertimenti moderni il cinema occupi un posto d'importanza universale...[e] la
più popolare forma di divertimento che si offra per i momenti di svago, non solamente
ai ricchi, ma a tutte le classi sociali'
7
'un nuovo tipo di rito periodico'
8
'chiesa dell'uomo moderno nelle grandi città'
9
See Lottini, 2011; for the cultural distinctions operative in categorising Italian silent
films, see Brunetta, 1980: 86.
10
'morale, moralizzatore, educatore'
11
‘L’arma piu’ forte’.
12
'noi facciamo il cinema per il popolo, per le masse.'
13
‘il pubblico invariabilmente si annoia quando il cinematografo lo vuole educare’
14
'poetica di un paese che ha la sua più vera umanità nel popolo.'
15
'svuotando dei contenuti reali di classe un'idea di popolo, che diventa così una "unità
mitica"'
16
‘ai nomi di Blasetti, di De Santis, di Germi e di tanti altri colleghi che cercano un
contatto vivo col pubblico… abbandonata nel deserto’
17
'Quello che [il pubblico] ama di più è vedere come, attraverso l'opera dello stesso fato,
per mezzo delle storture raddrizzate, nei limiti resi possibili dalla umanità stessa, o infine,
grazie alla rassegnazione là dove inutile e vana è la lotta, si possa arrivare a una felice
conclusione, a una più umana e sopportabile condizione di vita. Cioè la speranza, la
speranza in un mondo migliore.'
18
'si propone di suscitare l'ilarità del pubblico, ma i nostri fantasmi con le loro avventure,
ci aiuteranno a capire alcuni meccanismi del nostro tempo'
19
The Vatican maintained a vigorous interest in recommending or advising against films
on moral grounds.
20
'[uno] strumento oppiaceo per livellare ai più bassi strati il gusto dello spettatore e
annullare del tutto (o quasi) le sue potenzialità critiche.'
21
'l'ansia, l'angoscia, il terrore del "popolare" nella cultura italiana.'
22
‘segnano la fase di “divulgazione” del neorealismo, cominciano ad inserirsi, sulla
sincerità dell’indagine, elementi romanzeschi e melodrammatici più o meno vistosi’
23
‘un'Italia trasteverina e provinciale [dietro la quale] si scoprirà l'inconsistente schema
narrativo, la povertà morale.'
24
'ottimismo sano e costruttivo'
25
'pericoloso pseudorealismo dei vari Pane, amore e... e di tutta la serie "ottimista"'
26
‘autori e opere isolate, [che sono] artisticamente e culturalmente valide'
27
‘gli appetiti più superficiali delle platee di tutto il mondo'
28
'la tradizione evasiva e consolatoria del cinema imbonitone di platee e narratore di
favole'
29
'cinema che quanto più sconvolge convenzioni, linguaggi, formule e idee canonizzate
tanto più fatica a conquistare la platea.'
30
'il "reale" diventa, così, gioco e spettacolo'
31
'le leziose mistificazioni, dei giochi di specchi lietamente deformanti.'
32
'pure di tipo "culinario"'
33
'merce consumabile'
34
'il popolare si contraddistingue per prendere le distanze dalla tradizione in favore di
uno spiccato desiderio di innovazione.'
35
'una élite che si qualificava di sinistra'
36
'Un cinema è d'autore quando tende a negare la propria origine spettacoloare e
industriale? È di evasione quando non si struttura in
espliciti fini politici e
pedagogia? Sostenere questo vuol dire esorcizzare l'analisi critica delle opere con
formule verbali, ignorare che ogni rappresentazione è sempre anche trasformazione
dell'oggetto rappresentato...'
37
'mitologia conservatrice... e l'iconoclastia schizoide.'
38
'plebee...la fiera in nome del museo.'
39
'Non è La terra trema il film che contrassegna l'ultima stagione degli anni quaranta,
come banalmente credono taluni, ma Catene, oppure che i due film alternativi del 1954
non furono Senso e La strada, come immaginarono in quei tempi oscuri i poveri di
spirito, ma Senso e Casa Ricordi.'
40
'i personaggi della commedia popolare [sono] in bilico tra accettazione e rinuncia, tra
spinte e frustrazioni.'
41
‘Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Aldo Lado, Riccardo Freda
Fernando di Leo, Sergio Martino e via riscoprendo.’
42
'popolare si oppone infatti alla massa come qualcosa di ora autenticamente originale
e primogenio ora di naif, banale o piattamente commerciale; dall'altro lato, popolare si
impone come qualcosa d'anonimo, di diffuso, rispetto all'inconfondibile singolarità
dell'autore; infine, popolare si oppone all'élite.'
43
See Bondanella 2012, Burke 2013, Celli and Cottino Jones 2007, Landy 2000, Sorlin
1996, Wood 2005.